Thirteen years ago, when James W. Wagner, an engineer turned administrator, introduced himself to alumni of Emory University as the new president, he was uniformly greeted with one question: Was he there to start an engineering school? After all, why else would Emory, which has always fashioned itself as a classic liberal-arts institution, hire away the provost of Case Western Reserve University, an institution popular among engineering majors? Why else hire a researcher whose career highlights have included developing a device to measure urethral pressure, if not to double down on science, technology, engineering, and math?

April 3, 2016 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education